


Caitiff

by QuickYoke



Series: Cloisonné [2]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Other, beware the classical allusions, they haunt us, weird fiction and horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 10:34:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2544389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickYoke/pseuds/QuickYoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A one-shot featuring Carmilla, Betty’s abduction, and the Dean. Because I have a weakness for horrible mother-daughter relationships. Part 2 of Cloisonné.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caitiff

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Tumblr, then uploaded here.

* * *

 

“ _And with my incantations I break the serpent’s teeth;  
_ _and root up nature’s oaks and rocks from their native heath;  
_ _and move the forests, and command the mountaintops to shake,  
_ _earth to groan, and from their tombs the sleeping dead to wake._

_Now I need the juice by which old age may be renewed,_  
 _that can regain the prime of years, return the flower of youth,  
_ _and You will grant it.”_

_-Medea  
_ _Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” book_ _VII_

* * *

 

Carmilla was, above all else, a coward and an awful liar. Cowards die many times before their deaths; that rang true for her more than any other she had yet encountered. She saw her death in every girl she lured to her mother. Betty was no different. 

Together they walked across the moors separating Silas University campus and the Stygian wood that snarled the surrounding countryside, Carmilla in front, Betty at her heels. Like a faithful hound the girl fawned in Carmilla’s wake, wide-eyed and eager. She waited in the slanted moonless darkness for the slightest indication of interest: a stray flickering gaze, or a soothing invitation to dialogue. Carmilla gave none. Betty was just another one of her failures, one of her many deaths.

When she first died, she shit herself. Carmilla always remembered the smell – they never tell you about that in the pretty stories. To her death always reeked of feces and butcher’s blood encrusted under fingernails. When she awoke after her death, the smell was the first thing to greet her, followed by the vision of a stately woman looming over her in a dark dress. The woman had not wrinkled her nose or made any display of grief over finding a young freshly dead noblewoman upon the ground. She had arresting eyes – that was what Carmilla remembered next – level and hard as volcanic glass. When she spoke, she bewitched, and immediately Carmilla was her creature. It was not a matter of choice. There was no room for discussion. Death simply was – an accumulation of scent and sight and sensation, but most of all speech – and the matronly woman called herself “Mother,” and so she was too.

With every girl Carmilla brought to her mother, the more she questioned these statements of fact. Death was simple and wild. The woman in black was her mother. The woman in black had saved her from an untimely afterlife, and all she asked in return was services rendered, rituals completed. Just once every twenty years, and Carmilla could be her own person during the interim. Or so she was told. But that was where the problem lay: in the telling.

Betty’s hand was sticky and warm. Carmilla resisted the urge to snatch her own hand away and wipe it on her pants. Behind her Betty trudged, her step wavering, stumbling like a newborn doe. Sighing, Carmilla tugged her along, gritting her teeth when the girl giggled weakly and mumbled something unintelligible yet encouraging. That was always the worst, the way they thanked her for delivering them to her mother, urged her to bear death instead of dower. They all fell so easily to her wiles, flattering them with watery affection until they followed her into the lion’s den, easy as lambs.

She told herself she didn’t actually abduct them. She told herself her mother was the sole lector of these evils. Calumny and lies helped her sleep during the day. Unfortunately the tales she spun did not weave with the same potency as her mother’s oratory.

Her mother issued orders with the finesse of a forger wielding her pen. Carmilla shivered to recall her voice, like the dart of sparrows, foreign and dark, utterly untranslatable. Power was in the name, the word, and her mother cradled language to her chest like a fan of cards. Nameless she remained, hailed only as “Mother”, “Comtesse”, “Madame”, “Dean” — titles of rank, and not a single one of them authentic. She had a penchant for fiction, this hushed rhetor — to palter was in her very nature — turning jewel-like clicking phrases between her teeth like hard-boiled sweetmeats

The power of Carmilla’s name was in its protean character, capricious and given to flights of fancy. Whereas her mother was the exact opposite: power born of simultaneous austerity of garrulity, obscurity in palaver, a mangled mesh of contradictions. Her mother spoke with such conviction, the world was convinced of that reality. For all that there were only two times when her mother would speak most.

One: After she had finished feeding.

The girl Carmilla had lead to her would be gone, and in her stead the Comtesse would stretch out, languid, upon a bed or couch, satisfied as a well-gorged serpent. She was almost affectionate during those times, lips plied and stained burgundy, drawing Carmilla forward with a lazy gesture. Slurred and murmuring, the warm pant against Carmilla’s ear smelled of ash and sulphur, her mother’s gaze dark and heavy-lidded. She would invent strange expressions while she stroked Carmilla’s curling hair, gentle, noble, an architect of dreadful ill. Later, after she had extracted herself from her mother’s clutches, Carmilla would mull over the muffled memory of the words spoken, but could only ever recall a noiseless static. She tried taking a pen with her on one occasion in an attempt to record the dialogue. When she found herself back in her own room, however, the pen had been snapped in half and great gouging whorls had been carved into her palms like staring eyes or gaping toothless mouths.

Two: When she had not fed in years.

At first Carmilla thought it was a force of habit; her mother tended to hunger with the same fanatical attention she gave to reservation. After the cycle had come and gone multiple times though, she realised otherwise. Twenty years was the limit of her mother’s abstinence. By the last year she looked gaunt, thin, stretched as though the flesh was pulled taut over her bones. During the last few weeks of fast, she would pace the hallways, sleepless, her footsteps echoing with the grind of a double-headed axe dragged over splattered marble. Carmilla dared spy her in the witching hour muttering furiously to herself in barbaric tongues, her voice like a wind, black, and wet, and of night. Though Carmilla herself, a young noblewoman from another age, knew a variety of languages, she could not place that arcane dialect into which her mother slipped like a memory slips through time. Always she would sense Carmilla’s presence. Her mouth would set in a narrow line with a clack of sharp teeth, and she would storm the space between them to tower over her misbegotten child. She would grip Carmilla painfully by the arms, and run her hands feverishly over her dress until the folds stuck to Carmilla’s like a skin, quivering with the force of her address, words burning from her throat like a hammer ringing at a bright forge. In those moments she seemed more terrible than ever, three-faced, three-stomached, three times as deep as heaven is high, a silhouette wreathed in clamouring shadows with eyes that wept blood.

Betty was whimpering softly. Carmilla blinked and relaxed her hand. She had not realised she’d been crushing the girl’s fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she said, then instantly regretted it.

Once upon a time she used to try to alleviate the process of these girls’ imminent transcription. Now she tried interacting with them as little as possible. Hers was a taciturn seduction. She did not know which was worse: to care, or to slowly become more and more like the thing she feared and despised most in equal measure. So sly, so insidious was her mother’s wont, she seemed to inhabit a thronging space in Carmilla’s mind, crouched somewhere between id and superego, hissing wordlessly. True monsters had no voice. They were recorded externally, their silence pervasive, poisonous, and suffocating.

“It’s alright,” Betty sighed. Relief stole over her pretty features like a cloud across the starry sky. She looked so damnably devoted, so kind, so young. She stank of youth the way a baby reeked of milk and fairy-tales. A smile suffused her face.

“Don’t do that,” Carmilla snapped. She didn’t have to look behind her to see the eager parted mouth.

Betty blinked, slow and guileless, her vision hazy, “Ok,” she said listlessly, “Where are we going again?”

“Stop talking. I don’t like it when you all talk.”

Betty frowned, puzzled, but lumbered along regardless, dumb and limp as a drugged horse. She had to stoop to keep holding Carmilla’s hand while they strode through the misty fen. The treeline bristled above them now, curved boughs branching out to enfold them in the cold, low-slung fog.

Each delivery filled Carmilla with a sense of unease, but Ell was the first to impart the notion of sedition. From this encounter Carmilla learned how love and truth inspire betrayal. For her treachery her mother swaddled her in a stone cocoon and left her to foul transformations. Carmilla could not even struggle. Her mother spoke a single word and Ell had died, withered away to nothing in a moment. She spoke another word and Carmilla lowered herself into a lime-rimmed coffin filled with blood, scrapped the lid overhead with her own hands. That was all the persuasion the will required to abandon its owner: a lone deceitful tongue.

In any other mouth such an instrument would produce no music. But her mother constructed recursion until she was divinely hatched of it. To unfold truth from fear’s tangled skein was a hopeless exercise, and all in vain became its own remedy. Carmilla could not kill her mother — much as she dreamed of matricidal triumph; her mother would not consent to die – but she could spite her. She could cut corners, let loose a victim here, a hart there, small victories. Yet she could never truly thwart her. Such a close-drawn net that none of the great, nor yet of the young should escape the immense ensnaring net of thraldom. To die her mother must be convinced of death. How could a deceiver be convinced, but by their own gilded tongue?

Ell taught her the price of insurgency, but not the means to enforce it. With every girl delivered Carmilla watched her own death re-enacted. She felt the will shrivel and fade in her chest – grown so fain to slay her mother, yet with no teeth to back her bite. With every girl delivered she felt less like a sombre shade leading the deceased, and more like a faithful worshipper offering sacrifices at the altar of a chthonic deity.

The woods grew thick, and fast, and savage. At a crossroads among a crowded copse of trees there sprawled a house like a living thing that had tumbled from the heavens and crippled itself in the long descent. Wings sprouted organically in all directions, and every time Carmilla returned it had struck out once more, bulging along the forest floor. She felt the hard glare of the camed windows and deep-set eaves upon their approach. Its shingles wrinkled, it’s porches sagged with weight and age. A single black-faced wether could sometimes be spied in its shade where the grass grew gnarled and unkempt. Despair haunted the dwelling like the sum of all its memories.

Carmilla told herself it was Betty’s hand that started to tremble and sweat. Vampires did not sweat. It must have been Betty. Carmilla had always been a terrible liar.

She knocked. The earth beneath the old house groaned, and the large doors yawned open. Betty huddled and whimpered like a kicked dog. Upon the liminal space her mother stood, tall and thin and silent. Her mother’s gaze shone like distant lanterns through a marsh. The house beyond was a wounded breathing black. She had eyes only for Betty. Her sunken cheeks trembled at the sight of her, and the shadows drew close around them, half-starved and draconic.

She did not speak, but Carmilla heard and understood the command. As gently as she could she untangled her fingers from Betty’s, moving slowly less out of an attempt to disturb the girl, and more derived from fear of incurring her mother’s wrath. Like prey slowly backing away from a fixed and murderous glower she stepped from the doorway. Betty’s arm fell slackly to her side, and she stared straight ahead into the distorted chasm, entranced by the articulated murk. Her mother drew Betty forward with a look and a whisper; the door creaked quickly shut.

Carmilla fled without a backward glance. Next time, she told herself. Next time.

She had always been a terrible coward.


End file.
